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Saturday, 29 January 2011

Participants at SAALG's 84th conference, Borderlands, hosted by the Royal Asiatic Society, were yesterday introduced to the Burmese collections of Colonel J.H. Green (1893-1975), now held in Brighton Museum, by Dr Mandy Sadan, Lecturer in the History of Southeast Asia, at SOAS. Green had been in the Kachin and Shan states in Burma in the 1920s and 30s to recruit members of the hill tribes into the army, and had collected textiles, photographs (about 2000), artefacts and written records. His collection includes extremely rare photographs of the Manau Festival taken in 1922. We were able to compare these with photographs Dr Sadan took in 2001.

In 2008-2009, supported by an ESRC grant, Dr Sadan returned to Burma to work on a knowledge transfer and digitisation project, resulting in 35,000 digital images. These included the archives of the Kachin Independence army and other armed groups.

For more information about the Manau Festival, see: http://www.kachinland.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=48&Itemid=79

You can view several videos of the 2011 Manau Festival on YouTube
One example, uploaded by Pmaligaya on 18 January 2011, follows.
For more information about the Green Collection at Brighton Museum, see:
http://rammworldculturesonline.org.uk/Research/The-Burma-Collection/About/